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Biehl book garners awards

Posted December 14, 2005; 10:13 a.m.

by Ruth Stevens

Joćo Biehl, assistant professor of anthropology, has won two awards
for his new book, "Vita: Life in a Zone of Social Abandonment."

He received the Eileen Basker Memorial Prize from the Society for
Medical Anthropology and an honorable mention for the Victor Turner
Prize for Ethnographic Writing from the Society for Humanistic
Anthropology.

The Basker prize is given annually for a large-scale work representing
superior research in the area of gender and health. The Turner prize is
given for an innovative book that helps to re-open anthropology to the
human subject.

The book, published in June by the University of California Press,
centers on a young woman named Catarina, who is increasingly paralyzed
and said to be mad. She is living out her time in Vita, an asylum in
southern Brazil. Biehl traces the complex network of family, medicine,
state and economy that led to her abandonment.

The awards were announced at a recent gathering of the American
Anthropological Association, where Biehl also won the Rudolph Virchow
Award from the Society for Medical Anthropology for his article, "The
Activist State: Global Pharmaceuticals, AIDS and Citizenship in
Brazil," which was published in Social Text in 2004.

Also at the meeting, two Princeton students, Amy Saltzman, a 2005
graduate, and Michael Oldani, a graduate student, won awards from the
Society for Medical Anthropology for their papers. Michele Rivkin-Fish,
a 1997 Princeton graduate alumna, won the society's Polgar Prize for
the best article appearing in Medical Anthropology Quarterly.